Libya and Hawkish Revisionism

Saturday was the day the State Department ordered the evacuation of the U.S. Embassy in Libya. Only three years ago, Obama helped NATO allies overthrow Moammar Kadafi as part of his “lead from behind” doctrine, but he has done little to help the resulting democratic government secure its authority.

Not only did the U.S. not support sending international peacekeepers [bold mine-DL], it didn’t mount a serious program to train a new Libyan army.

This is the standard hawkish critique of the Libyan intervention, which pretends that the flaw in the administration’s policy was in being too hands-off after the regime had been toppled. It conveniently omits the fact that the interim Libyan government wanted no part of any foreign stabilization force in late 2011 or early 2012 when it mattered, and ignores that there was no government anywhere interested in filling a peacekeeping role once the old regime fell. The intervening governments were never willing to participate in a significant post-war role, and made that quite clear while the war was still going on. Indeed, it was an essential part of the argument that American interventionists made at the start of the war: there would be no U.S. ground forces deployed to Libya to fight, nor would there be any deployed to a post-Gaddafi Libya. Interventionists don’t get to have the domestic political advantages of avoiding a prolonged occupation while disavowing the consequences of the regime change they supported. Libya is in chaos in large part because outside forces aided anti-regime rebels in destroying the existing government, and the governments that intervened are at least partly responsible for what they have wrought.

It doesn’t follow from this that the solution for Libya was or is to increase the involvement of outside governments in misguided efforts to stabilize the country. Having seen what a “serious program” to train local forces produced in Iraq, it is far from obvious that a more concerted effort by the U.S. to train Libyan government forces would have changed much of anything for the better. Similarly, the presence of foreign troops in Libya would more likely have triggered armed resistance against the new government, which would probably have then turned into another ill-fated attempt at counterinsurgency to shore up an increasingly unpopular government. The Libyan war was a serious blunder, but it was not one that would have been undone by committing more resources and risking more lives.

Boot’s criticism is mostly just another desperate effort to try to deny that military intervention and regime change are primarily to blame for Libya’s current state. This is akin to the arguments we heard from liberal hawks when the conditions began to deteriorate rapidly in Iraq: “yes I supported the invasion, but I don’t agree with how Bush has handled things after that.” They evaded responsibility for their support for the invasion by faulting the Bush administration for its poor management of the war, which presupposed that there was a realistic way to destroy another government without unleashing the chaos and violence that inevitably followed. Boot is much the same: he was all for intervening in Libya, but he doesn’t want the negative consequences of that policy to be linked to the Republican hawks that backed yet another ill-conceived war. One would have thought that the experience of occupying Iraq would put an end to the fantasy that a prolonged foreign military presence in these countries ensured stability and security, but it seems not.

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15 Responses to Libya and Hawkish Revisionism

The U.S. posted a $130 billion budget deficit in May and the smallest shortfall for the first eight months of a fiscal year since 2008, as a stronger economy and rising employment bolster revenue.

The deficit last month was about $9 billion less than the $139 billion shortfall in May 2013, the Treasury Department said today in Washington. The median estimate in a Bloomberg survey of 20 economists called for a $130.5 billion gap.

Bleed at ruinous expense for no real benefit in Libya, or stay out of other people’s irrelevant wars to save the money that just might make a difference to Americans instead. Which is the truly conservative outlook here?

“Apparently, Boot hasn’t been paying attention to the performance of the American-trained “new Iraqi army” and its ability to hang onto its arsenal.”

We haven’t learned much about the nature of warfare to be honest about it. The American public seems to think there is some kind of clean war, perhaps, lulled into such thinking by the first Gulf invasion. But regardless of that, we have experienced enough blood and sinew to know that war is serious business.

And that has now flooded policy decisions. War at no cost — it is virtually impossible achievement. The Green Zone, Lead from behind (bizarre), all in a vain attempt to avoid the inevitable public recoil when the first body arrives home.

I think we need to serious challenge all executives and “law makers” on what they expect to happen upon military intervention. And should they fail to acknowledge death, and mayhem, consider them not fit for office.

If you are so afraid of the consequence that it hinders the objective for sheer fear — don’t do it.

Military interventions by Obama have been disasters. It’s damning with faint praise that people feel they have to defend his decisions to not compound those disasters by intervening further.

What I want to know is whether Larison thinks Obama has made mistakes in not intervening diplomatically (with aid, for instance) to strengthen countries on the verge of sliding backwards (in say Mexico, Argentina, Cuba). (Or is this a non-starter, due to congressional disfunction?)

It’s like the US thinks the only tool it has is the hammer, and Obama has only been using it slightly more judiciously than Bush.

One would have thought that the experience of occupying Iraq would put an end to the fantasy that a prolonged foreign military presence in these countries ensured stability and security, but it seems not.

It matters whose experiences. Experiences of some journo and purported “historian” from L.A. and experiences of a GI on the ground in some Iraq’s many hellholes cannot be farther apart. It also matters how those experiences are internalized. There will be no end to those fantasies, sadly.

Max Boot indeed is dead wrong, on the facts and about sensible policy options regarding Libya. I am sad to say my expectations of extended instability and chaos in Libya, if Gaddafi was overthrown, have been realized.

Is Master Boot still showing his face in public? In that case how about an indefinite moratorium on recirculating his gas?

I’m more interested in knowing what someone who was RIGHT about things, like Corelli Barnett, fo example, thinks of all this … Come to think of it Barnett’s only 90 something, and among his other attainments he served as a sergeant in the British Army in Palestine.

I’m more interested in knowing what someone who was RIGHT about things, like Corelli Barnett, fo example, thinks of all this …

His Masterpiece of The Collapse Of British Power is prescient and, actually, does have many answers. I lived (rather, survived) through the collapse of the Empire myself–that’s the main reason I admire him so much.

The thing with the last paragraph is that Iraq isn’t really a good analogy to Libya. There was no civil war in Iraq when the US invaded – the US in fact started the war.

There was a civil war in Libya when NATO intervened. Would Qaddafi have won without NATO intervention? Perhaps. Or it might have gone like Syria, which has done quite well keeping its war going without (overt, direct) US intervention. A majority of Libyans were in favor of NATO intervention in 2011, and a majority supported no foreign intervention in the postwar period. So it sounds like they’re getting exactly what they want.

There is a good question as to what that intervention got for the US (or for the European powers), besides a terrorist attack in Benghazi. Yet it is plainly stupid for people like Boot to spin *not* indefinitely occupying another country as “weakness”, but Boot is an imperialist anyway.

“[Libya] is turning into the best shop window for competing aircraft for years. More even than in Iraq in 2003,” says Francis Tusa, editor of UK-based Defense Analysis. “You are seeing for the first time on an operation the [Eurofighter] Typhoon and the Rafale up against each other, and both countries want to place an emphasis on exports. France is particularly desperate to sell the Rafale.”

The self-exculpatory whine of the old Troskyite: “Communism didn’t fail! It was never tried!”

Now their ideological (and in some cases biological) descendents claim that interventionism didn’t fail, we just didn’t intervene enough. But instead of being consigned to the dustbin of history, their opinions continue to be published.